


A Sticky Lich-uation

by MaryPSue



Category: Gravity Falls, The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Balance Arc, Bill Cipher Being Bill Cipher, Gen, Major Character Undeath, Mythology References, The Power Of Mabel, Torture, fun with narrators, it's...despite the tags it's actually mostly crack, let Dipper say fuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-25 09:53:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15638334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: Ford’s always known that Bill Cipher would kill him, one day. He’d dared to hope that they would go down together, Holmes and Moriarty locked in deadly struggle over the edge of the Reichenbach Falls. But he’s always known, in the back of his mind, that it might come to this. That he might die before he has a chance to defeat Bill Cipher.Thankfully, he thinks, before the electrical charge stops his heart and short-circuits his brain for good, he’s made sure that’s not a problem anymore.





	A Sticky Lich-uation

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time, I asked for prompts of a character and a monster, for which I would write a hundred-word drabble. This is...more than a hundred words, as you may be able to tell. Featuring major character undeath, Bill Cipher being Bill Cipher, a TAZ: Balance crossover, Greek mythology references, the Power of Mabel, and many many more words than I expected to write.

It takes barely any voltage at all to set Fordsy’s hair on fire.

It’s honestly a little disappointing. Keratin has  _no_  heat tolerance! And sheesh, does it ever whiff when it burns! It’s really inconsiderate of Fordsy, to stink up the place. Bill’s gonna have to punish him for that. As soon as he regains consciousness, of course. No fun in electrocuting somebody who isn’t awake to hate it!

Speaking of ‘being awake’, Sixer’s been hanging there with his head down for an ominously long time now. Bill gives his belly a poke, but the momentum just swings him limply back and forth, the chains giving a faint, pathetic  _clink-clink_.

“You, uh, sure you didn’t break him there, boss?” Kryptos whines from somewhere behind Bill, and Bill can feel his faces heating up with rage. How dare that – that  _polygon_  question  _him_?  _Bill Cipher_?

“OF COURSE NOT!” he snaps. “I KNOW THIS HUMAN’S LIMITS BETTER THAN HE DOES! TESTED MOST OF ‘EM MYSELF!”

“Okay, but, he’s not doing a whole lot of screaming anymore.” Kryptos points one cautious finger around Bill, in Ford’s direction. “Or, um, moving.”

“KRYPTOS?” Bill says, cheerfully.

“Uh, yes, boss?”

“IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP I’LL FEED YOU TO PYRONICA,” Bill says, still cheerful, turning back to his favourite pet human.

Unfortunately, Kryptos is right about one thing – Sixer  _isn’t_  doing a whole lot of moving anymore. More just kind of…hanging there and smoking slightly.

_Boooo-_ ring.

Bill snaps his fingers, and a crackling blue arc of electricity leaps out of his pointed index finger to earth itself in Ford’s chest. Ford gives a pretty lame reprisal of the old kicking-and-screaming routine, his legs wobbling feebly against thin air, his ‘scream’ more of a tortured groan. It’s like he isn’t even  _trying_.

“C’MON, SIXER, PUT SOME OOMPH INTO IT!” Bill complains, cutting the lightshow short. “THIS IS GETTING OLD! HAHA! JUST LIKE YOU!”

The only response he gets is the faint hiss of the little fires still going in Fordsy’s hair. He’s gonna have a constellation of bald spots when this is over.

“AW, COME ON,” Bill coos, tucking one finger under Ford’s tiny chin and gently lifting it from his chest. “DON’T TELL ME YOU’RE STILL SULKING ABOUT THE WHOLE ME-LYING-TO-GET-YOU-TO-DESTROY-YOUR-ENTIRE-DIMENSION THING!”

Ford’s eyes, which had been half-closed and downturned like he was ignoring Bill, suddenly flick up to stare directly into Bill’s pupil. Bill nearly drops Ford’s bristly little face in surprise at the ring of flickering red wrapped around each iris.

“OOH, SIXER, YOU’VE BEEN HOLDING OUT ON ME!” Bill crows, delighted. “SHOULDA KNOWN YOU HAD ONE LAST TRICK UP YOUR SLEEVE! THAT’S WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU, HOW THAT FUNNY LITTLE MEAT BRAIN OF YOURS NEVER STOPS TICKING!”

“Get your hands off me, Cipher,” Ford growls, under his breath, and it seems to Bill to have harmonics that it could only have picked up by echoing through some of the more Escherian corners of the Fearamid. “Or I can’t be responsible for what happens next.”

“OH, I’M SO SCARED!” Bill laughs, rolling his eye. “WHAT’RE YOU GONNA DO TO ME, FORDSY, BITE MY KNEES OFF?”

When Ford’s eyes narrow, spitting red sparks, Bill can’t help but laugh again. “NO, SERIOUSLY, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GONNA DO HERE? I’M ALREADY HERE! THIS DIMENSION’S AS GOOD AS MINE!” He throws his arms wide, gesturing to the whole of the Fearamid and his crew, the carnage outside, the enormous rift that dominates the yellow sky. “AND IF IT WAS THE MAIN COURSE, THEN YOUR LAWS OF PHYSICS MADE A NICE AFTER-DINNER MINT! A LITTLE BLACK MAGIC’LL BE THE PERFECT TOOTHPICK! BUT GO AHEAD! LAY IT ON ME!”

Ford starts to open his big mouth, probably to make some stupid speech about the power of friendship or something, and Bill zaps him again. Whatever he was about to say vanishes in a strangled half-scream as his whole body jerks, jittering like a marionette with its strings caught in a high-voltage power line.

Oh, wait. That’s exactly what he is!

“WELL?” Bill demands, in between zaps and the hoarse, exhausted noises of distress Ford keeps making. “DO YOUR WORST! REALLY LET ME HAVE IT, SIXER! SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT! DON’T – HOLD – BACK!”

Ford’s body gives one final, enormous spasm, and then falls limp, his voice cutting out as his head falls backwards. One boot twitches, one shoulder jumps, but there’s no intelligence, no intention behind the movements. Just leftover electricity sparking frazzled nerves and jerking Ford’s limbs around like the puppet he is.

Bill twirls to face the audience of Henchmaniacs who’ve assembled to watch the fun, blowing across the tip of his pointed finger like he’s blowing smoke away from the barrel of a pistol. He quickly considers a variety of clever one-liners, discards them all just as quickly as not clever enough. “WELL, THAT WAS DISAPPOINTING! SOMEBODY GET ME ANOTHER MARTINI.”

Nobody laughs. Nobody cheers. Nobody raises a glass. They all just stare, with these stupefied expressions.

“WHAT? YOU’VE NEVER SEEN ME CRISPY-FRY A GUY ALIVE BEFORE?” Bill asks, looking over the assembled crew of nightmares and monsters.

“Uh, boss?” Kryptos quavers, slowly raising one hand, and that’s when Bill realises that those expressions of awe mingled with horrified respect aren’t aimed  _at_  him, but at something slightly behind him.

“OH, SH-” he starts.

...

It was about a decade into his thirty years of wandering the multiverse that Ford had first stumbled across the crew of the Starblaster.

It wouldn’t be the last time their paths would cross. Over those thirty years, Ford thinks he’d encountered the IPRE no fewer than seventeen times. Whether or not they were the  _same_  IPRE every time is a matter he prefers not to think about. It raises entirely too many questions that he isn’t certain he even wants the answers to.

He doesn’t remember exactly when the seed of an idea was planted. Doesn’t remember exactly when he realised the parallels between their situation and his. Both running from a world-devouring horror, both the only ones able to end its reign of terror. But, unlike the crew of the Starblaster, if Ford loses his life in his travels, he doesn’t get another at the end of a year. And there’s no one else who can stop Bill Cipher if he falls.

Ford’s always known that Bill Cipher would kill him, one day. He’d dared to hope that they would go down together, Holmes and Moriarty locked in deadly struggle over the edge of the Reichenbach Falls. But he’s always known, in the back of his mind, that it might come to this. That he might die before he has a chance to defeat Bill Cipher.

Thankfully, he thinks, before the electrical charge stops his heart and short-circuits his brain for good, he’s made sure that’s not a problem anymore.

...

The Shacktron’s almost within punching distance of the ominous floating black pyramid when the pyramid suddenly shudders in the sky.

“What -” Dipper starts, peering up through the Shacktron’s window. He doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence, though, because the pyramid gives another heaving shudder and then – explodes.

Well, okay, only one side of it explodes, with a sound like extremely distant and extremely loud fireworks, a burst of rainbow-edged black rubble, and ropes of crackling red lightning. Dipper has to blink a couple times to be sure he’s seeing right, but – yep, that’s the gigantic, hateful yellow face of Bill Cipher flying at top speed out of the middle of the pyramid wall in a shower of rubble, looking  _extremely_  surprised.

He’s followed by –

Dipper’s first, slightly crazy thought is that it’s a ball of red neon yarn, halfway through unravelling, like the ones Mabel’s always got three or four of hidden somewhere under her sweater. Then he thinks it’s ball lightning, like they’re always trying to use to explain away UFO sightings. But it’s more like…a ball of yarn, only the yarn  _is_  lightning. And wearing…a ratty old tan trenchcoat?

“Oh no,” Dipper mutters.

Bill whirls in midair, rounding on the crackling ball of electricity that Dipper’s somehow sure is his Great-Uncle Ford. Somehow. The last time he’d seen Ford, Ford had admittedly not been an amorphous mass – okay, more of a very rough, gigantic, skeletal humanoid figure, now – made of red lightning. But then again, the last time Ford had seen Dipper, Dipper wasn’t helping pilot a giant robot. It’s the end of the world. His great-uncle turning into a lightning-monster…skeleton?...isn’t the weirdest thing Dipper’s seen in the last twenty-four hours.

Although, he has to admit, it’s up there.

Bill’s voice reverberates through the air, rattling the Shacktron’s windows. “WELL THEN! THANKS FOR THE NEW PICTURE WINDOW, BUT I CAN’T SAY YOU’VE GOT MUCH OF A FUTURE IN INTERIOR DESIGN, SIXER!”

He raises one monstrous, noodly black fist, and Dipper feels something cold slither down his spine.

“CAN’T SAY YOU’VE GOT MUCH OF A FUTURE AT ALL!” Bill crows, before swinging that fist, like the hand of Fate, at the sparking figure that is Ford –

\- and right through him.

“WHAT?!” Bill screeches, a feedback whine that forces Dipper to clap both hands over his ears if he wants to keep his eardrums.

Despite the fact that the thing that was Ford doesn’t really have any clear facial features, Dipper can still tell, somehow, that he’s smiling.

Bill’s eye narrows, going flame-blue, and Dipper throws out an arm, like he can reach across the mile or more between them and stop Bill in his tracks. But before Bill can do whatever he’s planning to do, two bolts of crimson lightning arc out from Ford’s trenchcoat, blowing it back in some eldritch wind, and earth themselves in the centre of Bill’s eye.

Bill doesn’t move, for a moment, and Dipper realises he’s holding his breath.

And then red lightning erupts, from between each and every one of Bill’s bricks, forcing them apart. Bill shakes, for a second, like the black pyramid had, his body straining to hold together even as lightning lashes through and between his bricks, pushing them apart. Dipper can see daylight through the cracks in Bill’s form.

And then –

Dipper has to throw up an arm to protect his eyes from the burst of red light as Bill –  _explodes_ , like he’s been stuffed full of dynamite and it’s all going off in a string, bricks flying in all directions and shattering into pieces as they fly apart. The roar is deafening.

The Shacktron erupts into cheers, almost drowning out the patter of smoking chunks of yellow triangle raining down around them. Dipper throws an arm up, instinctively, to protect his head, as one lump hisses past inches from the Shacktron’s main window, momentarily blotting out the sun. It’s hard to make out more than a hazy red glow through the clouds of drifting, slightly sparking smoke. And that glow could be the sun, the rift, or whatever power Ford’s summoned up.

“Well, guess we didn’t need to do all that planning after all,” Mabel says brightly, from somewhere to Dipper’s left. “Go, Grunkle Ford!”

To Dipper’s right, Stan crosses his arms over his chest. “See, kid? Told you my nerd brother didn’t need  _me_  to rescue him.”

“Um,” Dipper says. He’s pretty sure he’s not just imagining that that hazy red glow is getting brighter. And bigger.

And closer.

...

Cipher falls in pieces.

It's harder to think when you're dead. 

No. Not think. Focus. 

Focus.

Focus on what? 

Clouds of smoke too thick. Impossible to see if Cipher is re-forming. Too easy. This can't be it. After all this time? Can't be this simple.

Movement. On the left. Cipher's Henchmaniacs? Cipher himself? Immolated with a thought. So easy. Too easy.

Lup said something about this. About the power. About something else too. A warning. Not that he needs to be warned about anything anymore. Movement to the right this time becomes a pillar of flame. It’s so  _easy_. 

He should have died years ago. If he’d known it would be like this, he would have. All that time wasted on quantum destabilizers when  _this_  power was waiting just under his skin? Foolishness.  _Selfish_  foolishness. 

So easy. After all this time. So easy to make Cipher burn.

So easy to make  _everything_  burn.

...

“Um, guys?” Dipper quavers, pointing towards the window where the red lightning skeleton guy is hovering. Sure, he’s wearing Grunkle Ford’s trenchcoat, and sure, he just blew up Bill Cipher, so it’s definitely Grunkle Ford, but it’s very important to take a moment and just appreciate this new look he’s rockin’. It’s a big change! He’s probably a little self-conscious about it. He’s gonna need  _lots_  of compliments. 

Good thing nobody gives compliments like Mabel!

“Grunkle Ford!” she cheers, running for the window. She ignores Dipper’s yell of “Mabel, wait!”. He can go be a big worrywart somewhere else. Mabel knows her great-uncles when she sees them. “That was so cool!” 

Mabel slaps both hands against the glass, leans her forehead against the window. On the other side of the glass, Grunkle Ford’s head tilts slightly to the left, lightning arcing from his shoulder down to his wrist in a wild, agitated wiggle. He raises his hand, palm towards the glass, and Mabel smacks her own hand against the glass between them in the best high-five she can give a skeleton guy made of lightning. Or should that be a high-six? Or - wait, now there’s another lightning bolt coming from Grunkle Ford’s hand, does that make it a high-seven - 

Stan tackles her around the waist and knocks her away from the window a second before it explodes.

...

Tiny figures scatter.

Mechanical monster lurches, roars. Another blast into its eye. Stumbles. Slow, certain, driving it back. 

Screaming. High and small and distant.

Monsters. All of Cipher’s monsters. All his waking nightmares. All his followers and friends.

Burn them  _all_.

“Mabel, give it up! That’s not Grunkle Ford anymore!”

“For once I agree with your brother. My idiot twin’s lost whatever was left of his mind, we gotta get outta here before he explodes us too!”

“ _No!”_ A note to shatter glass. “Grunkle Ford, please! We’re your family! You have to remember!”

“Mabel!” 

“Sweetie, no!”

Tiny figure charges forwards. Arms raised. Skids to a stop at the burst of flame.

“ _Please!_ It’s me, it’s Mabel! And Dipper, and Stan - you have to remember your own twin brother -”

Twin...?

_some brother you turned out to_

“No!”

Tiny figure, darting forward. Two of them, now. Mirrored. Why? What new trick of Cipher’s - 

“Great-Uncle Ford, I know you don’t want to do this! You’re a hero, remember? Not the bad guy!”

_because that’s what heroes_

“Kids!”

That voice. Scared raw, tiny under metal shrieks and crackling flames, but - 

_That_  voice - 

_you stay away from those kids I don’t want_

_some brother_

_accident_

_poindexter_

_high six?_

Ford gives himself a shake, all over. Like he’s waking from a long, long nightmare.

Stanley, crouched in front of the kids, glowers up from the wreckage of the Shack’s main window. Wait. The Shack isn’t - Legs. It has  _legs_?

“You wanna hurt these kids,” Stan growls. Threatening a force of nature with his bare fis- oh. No. With Pa’s old knuckledusters. Well, that makes this  _so_  much less idiotic. “You gotta go through me first.”

“I’d...prefer not to,” Ford manages. Has that hiss in his voice always - No. That way madness lies. “I - is anyone hurt?”

“Hurt, no. Traumatized for life, probably,” Dipper says. “Great-Uncle Ford, what the  _fuck_.”

“Dipper!” Mabel gasps.

“Mabel, we’re almost thirteen, you can stop pretending like we don’t know what swear words are! I know you only do it because you think Stan’s swear-substitutes are funny!”

“Wait, what? Have you kids been fucking with me  _all summer_  just to hear me say ‘hot Belgian waffles’ every time something went wrong?”

“No, just Mabel,” Dipper says. “For the record, none of this was my idea.”

“We’re gonna talk about this when we’re not standing in a giant robot that’s on fire,” Stan says. Glances up at Ford as he says it. “No thanks to you, Sixer.”

“I can’t actually,” Ford starts. “Um. Put it out.”

“Why am I not surprised,” Stan huffs. But he’s smiling. Kids clinging to him are smiling too. He doesn’t have a face, exactly, anymore, but - Ford knows he himself must be smiling as well. “Can you at least get us down from here?”

“Sorry, he’s not gonna be able to help you with that,” a voice - familiar? - says, just behind him, and then - 

a  _swish_  - 

a bright, blooming pain - 

and darkness.

...

“What did you  _do_?!” the besweatered kid yowls, shaking tiny fists in the air. She’s like four feet nothing of pure childish adorableness wrapped in a pink confetti sweater, but Barry catches himself taking an involuntary step backwards anyway.

“Yeah, I kinda had to send your uncle -”

“Great-uncle,” the kid who looks like a fifty-year-old university professor in a twelve-year-old’s tiny, sweaty body says. He sounds as unimpressed as he looks. Same with the girl. It’s not the usual reaction to a literal grim reaper. Barry would be lying if he said he wasn’t thrown a little bit off his game.

“Grunkle!” the girl protests. “He’s our Grunkle Ford and you shouldn’t have done...whatever you did!”

“ _Sent him_  to the Eternal Stockade,” Barry says, annoyed. “You don’t just get a free pass for being a lich because your great-niblings are cute - wait, did you say  _Ford_?”

Both the girl and the boy nod.

“Oh,” Barry says.

“Oh,” he says, again, looking around at the yellow sky and the big (but shrinking) glowing oil-slick X slashed across it and the menagerie of nightmares and monsters prowling the pines and the smoking chunks of yellow brick dotting the ground at the feet of the flaming robot.

“Uh oh,” he says, with feeling, looking down at the scythe in his hands. His currently very skeletal hands.

“Yeah, uh, Death, or whatever your name is? Can we take this conversation somewhere where we’re not about to burn alive?” the old guy with the kids asks, looking around him at the burning robot house. “Sure, I wanna be with my brother again, but I’d rather not get it by also dying.”

“Oh yeah. Uh, hang on a second,” Barry says.

“Running out of seconds here,” the old guy points out. “Real fast.”

“Okay, just -” Barry sighs. “Look. You want your great-uncle -”

“Grunkle!”

“Your  _grunkle_  back, okay, kid. Look, there are rules, and even if it was for a good cause, he broke them. The Raven Queen’s not gonna be too happy about that.”

“The who what with the what now,” the old guy says, deadpan, crossing his arms over his chest. Barry’s realising he kind of likes him. 

“The goddess of Death, can you try to keep up?”

“Wait, wait, so  _you’re_  not Death? There’s a hierarchy of Deaths? How does that work? If she’s a Raven  _Queen_ , is Death a monarchy? Is it constitutional, or does she rule by divine right? What -”

“Whoa, kid, slow down!” Barry says, partly because he’s a little scared the kid’s going to pass out if he doesn’t take a breath, partly because he doesn’t actually know the answers to at least half of those questions and he’s got a sinking suspicion they only get harder to answer from here. “Like I said. Raven Queen. Real pissed about liches.  _But -”_ he says, as they all start grumbling again, “and this is an important but, turns out she’s got a soft spot for heroes.”

“That’s Great-Uncle Ford!” the boy says, excited, sounding like a kid and not a fortysomething pencil-pusher for the first time. “He beat Bill Cipher and saved our dimension, he’s totally a hero -”

“Yeah. Only problem is, I already dropped him off in the Stockade. And, uh, they call it the  _Eternal_  Stockade for a reason.”

There’s a moment of silence, during which Barry notices a handful of people wearing colourful parachutes drifting towards the ground from the lower levels of the robot house. Are those... _sweaters_?

“Well, then, we’ll just have to go and get him!” the girl says, planting her hands on her hips and her feet shoulder-width apart like a tiny, determined Lynda Carter. Barry’s pretty sure the old man grumbles something like ‘oh, not  _again_ ,’ but he chooses to ignore it.

“That’s the spirit! Now, since I’m kind of the grim reaper, I’m not...technically allowed to help you.” He holds up a hand when the grumbling starts again, gives his scythe a one-handed twirl before cutting a portal through into the Astral Plane. The waters lap quietly against the shore, a beautiful, soothing contrast to the sharp snap and hiss of the flames starting to devour the walls. “I can get you started, but you’re gonna have to get in there and get out with him in tow without me.”

The girl’s already charging through the portal. Barry watches her feet disappear into the Astral Plane, then turns to the other two. 

For the first time, the boy looks uncertain. “I...I don’t know about this. Will we be able to get back? How will we know where to find him?”

“Hey, kid,” Barry says, in what he hopes is a comforting voice. Skin. It would probably be more comforting with skin. He tries it again, with a human face this time. “Look, I knew your great-uncle, so I know what kind of guy he is. I don’t wanna see him stuck in ghost jail for the rest of eternity any more than you do.”

“Really?” the boy asks, looking up at Barry with wide eyes, even as the old man’s eyes narrow.

“ _You_  knew Ford.”

“Well, I wasn’t the grim reaper at the time, but yeah. We ran into each other a couple times,” Barry says. He leaves out the part where he is probably personally responsible for Stanford Pines, Lich. That’s a need-to-know. As in, nobody, ever, needs to know. “Your great-uncle’s a big nerd, and that’s coming from me, but he’s got a good heart. He really doesn’t deserve to be treated like a death criminal forever.”

The old man sighs, glaring into the portal. “You’re gonna make me do  _this_  stupid thing, too, aren’t you.”

“Grunkle Stan, don’t be such a meanie-pants!” the girl pipes up, sticking her head back out of the portal. “Come on!”

She vanishes again before anyone can say a word.

“I have so many questions,” the boy says, looking up at Barry with an expression that Barry can only describe as ‘hungry’.

“Ask your great-uncle, kid,” Barry says. “When you rescue him.”

The boy bites down on his lower lip, and then looks up with a determined nod. Readjusting the cap on his head, he stalks forward, and into the portal.

The old man gives Barry a sidelong look. “This isn’t some kind of literal death trap, is it?”

Barry shrugs one shoulder. “You’re just gonna have to trust me. Or not.”

The old man - Stan - stares distrustfully at the portal for a long moment, and then sighs, uncrossing his arms and slouching forward in a clear expression of defeat.

“Somebody’s gotta look out for those kids,” he sighs. “And my idiot brother, I guess.” He takes a deep breath, throwing his shoulders back and his chest out. “And it beats burning alive.” 

He stomps forward, through the portal, and Barry can hear a distant, gravelly yell of, “Kids!”

He chuckles, to himself, before digging in the pockets of his flowing black robe for his Stone of Farspeech.

“Hey, babe? Remember that Ford guy we kept running into? ...Yeah, that’s the one. Listen. I need a favour...”

...

Mabel makes it halfway down the beach before a figure entirely draped in ominous black robes rises up before her, blocking her path. The figure hovers in place, its arms outstretched to its sides, skeletal hands peeking from under the edges of its robes. One of them holds an ornate scythe with a pattern of flames along the edge.

“Whoa!” Mabel shouts, skidding to a stop in the pebbly sand. Dipper pours on what little speed he has, running to catch up with her. He’s not sure what he’ll do against the death police, but he’s not letting them take his sister without a fight.

The figure slowly, slowly raises its hands, slowly, slowly peels back its hood to reveal a bare and glinting skull. As Dipper watches, a crimson flame erupts from the dome of the skull, forming a sweeping mane of hair. Red glints in the depths of the empty sockets as the skeletal figure slowly, slowly raises its head, fixing Dipper in place with a hollow, dreadful stare. He can’t move. His legs have frozen under him. His heart rabbits in his chest.

The skull’s lower jaw drops open, and from the depths of its dark robe, a hissing, sinister voice echoes:

“Hey there! Heard you nerds were going on an Orphean underworld quest!”

Dipper and Mabel exchange a startled look. Stan, puffing to a halt behind them, groans. “Oh, what  _now_?”

The skeleton in front of them grins... _more_  somehow. “Name’s Lup, and if I’m gonna be your guide, I literally cannot stress enough how important it is that you not look back.”


End file.
